How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Money!" he said. "Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose." (3.14)
Michaelis sees his own success as something that's just part of his nature, like his eye or hair color. The ability to make money is born into you, which is bad news for all those pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps stories.
Quote #2
"It's quite true, you can't live without cash," said May. "You've got to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along...even to be free to think you must have a certain amount of money, or your stomach stops you." (4.20)
Clifford's friend May pragmatically admits that money is a necessity. It's all well and good to talk about wanting to live the life of the mind, but it's hard to actually live it when your stomach is craving a double pounder with cheese—or an organic kale smoothie from Whole Foods, whatever gets your juices flowing.
Quote #3
Sobs, snuffles, a fist taken from a blubbered face, and a black shrewd eye cast for a second on the sixpence. Then more sobs, but subduing. "There, tell me what's the matter, tell me!" said Connie, putting the coin into the child's chubby hand, which closed over it. (6.51)
This isn't Connie Chatterley—this is Connie Mellors, Mellors's daughter. No child-like innocence here. Like Michaelis, Connie Mellors was born with the money instinct.
Quote #4
Money? Perhaps one couldn't say the same there. Money one always wanted. Money, Success, the b****-goddess, as Tommy Dukes persisted in calling it, after Henry James, that was a permanent necessity. (6.106)
Connie knows that money is necessary, too, but she doesn't feel very pragmatic about it. It's a "b****-goddess," half animal and half divine, and both halves end up controlling your life.
Quote #5
"Clifford and I together, we make twelve hundred a year out of writing"; so she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of nowhere. Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly proud of! (6.108)
Connie and Clifford make money through writing. Connie talks about it like something magical—the money doesn't come from human labor adding value to raw materials (which is how Karl Marx says that money is created) but from putting words down on paper. Pot, meet kettle.
Quote #6
Yet, if you were poor and wretched you had to care. Anyhow, it was becoming the only thing they did care about. The care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes. He refused to care about money. (10.392)
It's easy for Mellors to say he doesn't care about money, since he's got a nice steady job working with his hands and has the education and talents to find all kinds of work. It's a lot harder to tell a coal-miner with three kids, a wife, and one-trick resume to stop caring about money.
Quote #7
"I don't. But to the extent I do own it, yes, most decidedly. The ownership of property has now become a religious question: as it has been since Jesus and St Francis. The point is not: take all thou hast and give to the poor, but use all thou hast to encourage the industry and give work to the poor. It's the only way to feed all the mouths and clothe all the bodies. Giving away all we have to the poor spells starvation for the poor just as much as for us. And universal starvation is no high aim. Even general poverty is no lovely thing. Poverty is ugly." (13.35)
No re-distribution of wealth for Clifford. He's of the teach-a-man-to-fish (or mine coal) school of thought: there's no sense in providing charity to people, but owners do have a responsibility to provide work. No word on whether that work has to be safe or include health benefits, however.
Quote #8
"I'd like to give something," she said. "But I'm not allowed. Everything is to be sold and paid for now; and all the things you mention now, Wragby and Shipley SELLS them to the people, at a good profit. Everything is sold. You don't give one heart-beat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?"(13.52)
Connie isn't sold on Clifford's idea of himself of a benevolent master. She's basically saying that, sure, he might have built a school for the miners' children, but it's his mines that enslaved them to poverty and ignorance in the first place.
Quote #9
"Let's live for summat else. Let's not live ter make money, neither for us-selves nor for anybody else. Now we're forced to. We're forced to make a bit for us-selves, an' a fair lot for th' bosses. Let's stop it! Bit by bit, let's stop it. We needn't rant an' rave. Bit by bit, let's drop the whole industrial life an' go back. The least little bit o' money'll do. For everybody, me an' you, bosses an' masters, even th' king. The least little bit o' money'll really do. Just make up your mind to it, an' you've got out o' th' mess." (15.85)
Mellors has the solution: just stop using money, man. This idealistic, ridiculous vision is why Lawrence is the least radical radical you'll ever read. He doesn't want to live in a utopian future; he wants to live in a utopian past.
Quote #10
"There's no sort of conviction about anything, except that it's all a muddle and a hole. Even under a Soviet you've still got to sell coal: and that's the difficulty." (19.163)
Lawrence, speaking here through his favorite mouthpiece, Mellors, is definitely no communist. Communism, like the kind the Soviet Union was trying out in the 1920s, still takes place in a money-based economy. It's an alternative to capitalism rather than, as Lawrence wants, an alternative to modernity.